Thoughts on the social impacts of information and communication technology policy.
Three recent copyright stories of note:
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The Chronicle recently published a good column about blogging being “a hazard to a budding academic career.” The author agrees with me–blogging is an activity that helps you understand the new media landscape, as well as that of your students. He offers the following advice:
Be relevant. Rather than try to beat our brave new world, join it. … Embracing technology connects you not only to your students, but also to a world of better research through time-saving and exhaustive online databases.
He tempers this by offering more good advice to be honest, but never negative or slanderous. I hope this is advice I’ve lived up to, but that if not somebody would call me on it!
It can be tough to hear that blogging might be a strike against a job candidate. I only hope that an active, reflective understanding of how blogging might fit in our media landscape will be seen as an advantage.
Ars points out the increased scrutiny of “the role that MediaSentry plays in the RIAA’s legal campaign and whether the company should be licensed as a private investigator.” In one case, the RIAA argues that MediaSentury is actually a “copyright investigator,” and thus not subject to laws governing private investigators.
Private enforcement of copyright law has a history in the English Stationers’ Company.
During the Tudor and Stuart periods, the Stationers were legally empowered to seize “offending books” that violated the standards of content set by the Church and State; its officers could bring “offenders” before ecclesiastical authorities, including the Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury.
Wikipedia isn’t the best source for the story of the Stationers. I highly recommend Patterson’s Copyright in Historical Perspective for a convincing argument of the Stationers’ role in copyright history. Private enforcement of the law isn’t something we do much of in the U.S. (that I’m aware of), so we need to use history as a guide wherever appropriate.
This might just turn me back on to paper.
In college, people are at a stage in their education where they require 9/32nds of an inch between each line, which is why we make college-ruled notebooks. But I think we can all agree that grad school is a completely different world than college—a world where 9/32nds of an inch is simply too much room.
I blogged awhile back about cell (2D, including QR) barcodes. The Times published a piece about a pilot program at Case Western Reserve Univ using the technology… the result?
But interest in the pilot project, which started Feb. 1 and will run at least through May 15, has been tepid, according to students on campus, in part because of the cellphone fees associated with it. (It costs 2 cents or more to check when the next shuttle bus arrives, for instance.)
Two cents doesn’t sound like much, but it does add up, and more importantly acts as a disincentive when the value of the information doesn’t match the price + effort. This really makes me wonder about how the costs compare between the U.S. and countries where scanning is more popular. As far as I know, the only cost is for mobile time to connect to the Internet. I’d love to hear about prices abroad in the comments.
John is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin - Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He studies the social impact of media technology law and policy, with a special emphasis on copyright. He also is an instructional technology consultant for DoIT-Academic Technology.
John doesn't update his blog often, and many of the thoughts are probably half-baked. While the web has sort of an eternal memory, the current and future reader is urged not to take all of this too seriously.
Think of this blog as "John thinking out loud."
(For more on this idea and why I blog, please see this category.)
